In the following essay, Grattan considers Cooper to be an overrated writer who is remembered today mostly for his personality rather than his writings.

Among all the figures in American literature who have lately been under critical fire, Cooper has suffered as little as any. A curious chapter indeed could be written on the antics critics have gone through in swallowing him. Such a situation is not astonishing in the light of a knowledge of the dominant critics but it is astonishing to find so keen a man as Van Wyck Brooks concluding "the characters of Cooper lighted up a little fringe of the black uncut forest; they linked the wilderness with our own immemorial world," when he has dealt so caustically with figures of vastly greater literary importance...